Surveillance of Department of Defense service contracts
is too lax, the Government Accountability Office has said,
adding that efforts to improve it have been limited.
DoD spent $118 billion in fiscal 2003 on contractor services
is expected to rely even more on them in the future, and
GAO said surveillance of 26 of the 90 contracts it reviewed
was insufficient. For 15 of those 26 contracts, no personnel
were assigned surveillance responsibility, and the remaining
11 could not produce evidence of surveillance.
According to GAO-05-274, “some surveillance personnel did
not receive required training before beginning their
assignments,” and DoD officials said surveillance is not a
priority.
This is especially the case with the Army, which does not
require surveillance personnel to be assigned prior to
awarding contracts, and throughout DoD, the performance of
surveillance personnel is not evaluated, said GAO.
It said surveillance is usually a part-time duty that is
often neglected during the workday, and that while Defense
has taken steps to implement a provision of the defense
authorization act for fiscal 2002 designed to improve
management and oversight of service contract procurement,
as well as having issued a policy emphasizing the proper
use of other agency’s contracts, those efforts have done
little to improve service contract surveillance.
